One important item continued to elude James Holden. The Educator could
not be made to work in "tandem." In less technical terms, the Educator
was strictly an individual device, a one-man-dog. The wave forms that
could be recorded were as individual as fingerprints and pore-patterns
and iris markings. James could record a series of ideas or a few pages of
information and play them back to himself. During the playback he could
think in no other terms; he could not even correct, edit or improve the
phrasing. It came back word for word with the faithful reproduction of
absolute fidelity. Similarly, Martha could record a phase of information
and she, too, underwent the same repetition when her recording was played
back to her.
But if Martha's recording were played through to James, utter confusion
came. It was a whirling maze of colors and odors, sound, taste and touch.
It spoiled some of James Holden's hopes; he sought the way to mass-use,
his plan was to employ a teacher to digest the information and then via
the Educator, impress the information upon many other brains each coupled
to the machine. This would not work.
He made an extra headset late in June and they tried it, sitting
side-by-side and still it did not work. With Martha doing the reading,
she got the full benefit of the machine and James emerged with a whirling
head full of riotous colors and other sensations. At one point he hoped
that they might learn some subject by sitting side-by-side and reading
the text in unison, but from this they received the information horribly
mingled with equal intensity of sensory noise.
He did not abandon this hope completely. He merely put it aside as a
problem that he was not ready to study yet. He would re-open the question
when he knew more about the whole process. To know the whole process
meant studying many fields of knowledge and combining them into a
research of his own.
And so James entered the summer months as he'd entered them before; Tim
and Janet Fisher took off one day and returned the next afternoon with a
great gay show of "bringing the children home for the summer."
Even in this day of multi-billion-dollar budgets and farm surpluses that
cost forty thousand dollars per hour for warehouse rental, twenty-five
hundred dollars is still a tidy sum to dangle before the eyes of any
individual. This was the reward offered by Paul Brennan for any
information as to the whereabouts of James Quincy Holden.
If Paul Brennan could have been honest, the information he could have
supplied would have provided any of the better agencies with enough
lead-material to track James Holden down in a time short enough to make
the reward money worth the effort. Similarly, if James Holden's
competence had been no greater than Brennan's scaled-down description,
he could not have made his own way without being discovered.
Bound by his own guilt, Brennan could only fret. Everything including
time, was running against him.
And as the years of James Holden's independence looked toward the sixth,
Paul Brennan was willing to make a mental bet that the young man's
education was deeper than ever.
He would have won. James was close to his dream of making his play for an
appearance in court and pleading for the law to recognize his competence
to act as an adult. He abandoned all pretense; he no longer hid through
the winter months, and he did not keep Martha under cover either. They
went shopping with Mrs. Fisher now and then, and if any of the folks in
Shipmont wondered about them, the fact that the children were in the care
and keeping of responsible adults and were oh-so-quick on the uptake
stopped anybody who might have made a fast call to the truant officer.
Then in the spring of James Holden's twelfth year and the sixth of
his freedom, he said to Tim Fisher. "How would you like to collect
twenty-five hundred dollars?"